Anghiari si racconta

I was born on 18th May 1968, in Arezzo, but I grew up here in Anghiari. My family… they are not anghiaresi, my father comes from near Arezzo, my mother is from Citerna in Umbria. They worked in Anghiari and chose to live here.

I went to school here and in Sansepolcro, and then I attended high school in Arezzo. Around the age of 12, I started to develop a passion for music. My primary school teacher made us listen to classical music and I owe it all to her, my relationship with classical music – to love something, you need someone to take you close to it. Initially, I learnt from private teachers – I started with a musical theory teacher in Anghiari and, then, in Sansepolcro and later in Arezzo, I had lessons with instruments, starting with the cello and the double bass. And then, at the age of 16, I entered the Conservatory in Florence. At the time, it was possible to attend high school and start at the Conservatory, so I caught the bus to Florence every morning.

After the Conservatory, I studied for 2 years in Perugia and then, at 24, I went to the Brussels Royal Conservatory, and that is where I studied the viola da gamba. After my studies in Brussels, I stayed abroad for a while; I played all over Europe. And then, in 2000, I returned to Italy, initially to Arezzo because my girlfriend at the time lived there, and then I came back to Anghiari in 2007. Even though there was a lot more work in Belgium, I decided to move back here because I love this land. Now, I play with different small ensembles, I don’t have a stable one apart from the small Ombra Lucis that has been going for 20 years.

I think that my love of ancient music was born in parallel with the archaic beauty of this place. I have a very strong connection with Anghiari, but above all it is the landscape – this valley, all the hills … there is a different light. And the vineyards, olive groves, cypresses – I was missing all of this in Northern Europe. It is inside my way of playing – a place imprints itself on you. When I was in Belgium I was dreaming of cypresses.

There is something about the historical centre, but I don’t know really… I think the most important thing is its location, the classic medieval onion shape, the view from the town, the light, the swallows singing. Yes, they are all over Tuscany, but here is special. I have tried many times living in the historical centre, but it is too difficult for me with the instruments and a workshop. I lived here in via Nenci, then up the red steps here and then along La Croce. Now I live below the walls, but I can see the town.

I started learning how to make instruments because I had a passion for studying them, which is a small step towards making them. The Conservatory in Brussels was also a university, so I attended organology studies, the study of musical instruments. I studied with Karel Moens who was the curator, director and conservator at the Museum of musical instruments in Brussels, which together with Vienna, is one of the biggest in Europe. I had lots of lessons with him, and I was an apprentice with a number of luthiers. When I came back to Italy, for a long period I worked as an antique dealer, doing all the restoration work myself.

It is a different experience playing when you make instruments. There is more awareness of the right instrument for what you want to do. Every instrument is different and has its own characteristics, there isn’t some absolute of perfection. It is not by chance that in the past there were many more instruments, each one for a part of the repertoire, and some repertoires were born for a specific instrument.

The project we’re working on here involves the recreation of ancient instruments that have been lost or destroyed. There are very few that still physically exist from say 800 years ago because wood is perishable, fashion changes… and so there are some important effects in the repertoire for which we don’t have the instruments. So, they have to be reconstructed. The most interesting part is understanding how they were designed at the time … the true heritage, all that knowledge that a luthier had in ancient times, on which he based his instrument designs. The idea is rather simple: to be able to listen again to something that doesn’t exist anymore.

The main source we have for these instruments is paintings. And, for this project, it is a fresco in Ferrara, which was an important hub for musical instruments. There was a very lively court with Ercole the First, but even more so with his two children, Alfonso and Elisabetta d’Este, a kind of Renaissance godmother. It is a big fresco that shows all the musical practices at the Estense Court. The church is Santa Maria della Consolazione, dated around 1515. Because the fresco is so high up and the cupola deformed from a perspective point of view, we had to get a professional photographer with special equipment to photograph the sections we were interested in.

The only indispensable wood for these instruments is red spruce which is used to make the part that really plays, the harmonic plate. It comes from the Paneveggio forest in the Fiemme valley which has been important for harmonic spruce for centuries – with the high altitude, trees grow with specific characteristics very suitable for lutherie. For bodies, necks, plates you can use a great variety of wood – in classic lutherie, it is mainly Balkan maple. But there are many local woods that are suitable – yew, cypress, walnut – and we try to source them locally. The instruments for this project were found at the Ferrara court, but they were produced in Venice where wood arrived from all over the world and so they used more exotic species like ebony.

Students involved in the project come from all over Italy, especially from the north, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna. (In the future, others will come from abroad as we are twinned with foreign institutions.) They don’t pay, they have grants, they already know how to work. Artistic crafts require a long learning process, which we are losing now – with all the push for acceleration, skills will die. We must give more time to artists, create a society with more time. It is important to understand that when we go to a concert or a museum, or buy an object, it requires time.

I thought the project could be located here because there are suitable workshops, the building is very beautiful, the context is right from many points of view. We are doing exactly the same thing that was done in the past – this was a place dedicated to wood restoration that included also the design of a philological piece and the lutherie techniques that are more or less the same. They were teaching cabinetmaking: carving, inlays, decoration, lacquering, gilding, decorative painting. I thought it would provide continuity, producing other objects of the soul of this place.

It was one of the few Istituti d’arte … one became a Maestro d’arte – what a wonderful expression. It specialized in wood restoration, but they also built totally new pieces, following the great tradition of wood working, inlay, Italian inlay, negative/positive inlay, all the ancient techniques present in Italy. A great tradition, ours is a country made predominantly of artisans. My own connection with wood is through history, because it is really something universal – we live not only our lives, but also the lives of those who came before us, it goes well beyond our short life…and through teaching future generations, we go beyond, we become part of a much bigger experience.

I hope there will be continuity here, that, after the end of this project, this workshop can be kept open, and famous masters who have taught here brought back to continue the heritage of working with wood. We must find a way to keep it alive.

This is a 3 year project funded by PNRR [National Recovery and Resilience Plan] and we have already worked for a year and a half. It is going to be transferred to Gradara, a small town on the Adriatic coast, once some major building work has been completed. This is in a big tower where there will be workshops, a museum on the second floor with tools of the time, the trade routes, construction phases, techniques, glue, resins… (in Europe there are collections of musical instruments but not like this one on how they were made) and on the top floor there will be a small music hall.

With regard to concerts, we always play in Anghiari – I am a bit Anghiari-centric – but it is difficult, it is a small town, lacking resources. Every year we invite a famous performer, and they always fall a bit in love with this place. Concerts are free for everybody – I want them to be as accessible as possible, to allow people to encounter this repertoire. It will be kept alive if the community takes it up as its own, says ‘we want to support this initiative’.

I can see the difficulties for young people acquiring a different ‘language’. But there is a job we can all do in supporting and inspiring them in finding their path. If I hadn’t had my teacher who made me listen to classical music, I wouldn’t have discovered it. In finding music, I found myself and I experienced beauty. I believe that beauty is innate and that we have a role to play in bringing young people close to it, passing on this heritage.

My dream is to create a little island here in Anghiari where you can again find the human dimension of living, to win back time. I would like to bring life back to the ‘botteghe’, which were working places, places of knowledge, but also meeting places – people went to the artisans’ workshops, drank a glass of wine and talked. It was a whole different dimension on how to pass time, how to socialize around something that was growing. I experienced it, the last legacy of the great artisans still alive here, it was a splendid dimension … perhaps doing nothing, just sitting and watching someone working, a different dimension of working – creating, not simply producing. There is a big difference between ‘working’ and ‘creating’.